I don’t use this blog much…so I think I’m going to use it to do sort of a mini-series on what’s currently going on with my job right now. I’m going to keep this short because I have to be up in 5 hours for work. Gotta love it! Tomorrow’s my birthday and chances are good I will be working from 6am – 9pm or so. And this will continue on all week.

So what is it that I’m blogging about?

Bottle Raising Deer Fawns

On June 5th, one of our good does had two fawns. She always produces very healthy fawns, but being she’s an older doe, it’s extremely hard on her raising the fawns through the summer. She ends up dangerously skinny before she’s weaned her fawns off. So this year, we decided to go ahead and breed her anyway, except there was a catch.

This year, after the fawns were born, we would pull them from their mother within 48 hours and begin to bottle feed them. While I’ve tried bottle feeding sick fawns in the past, this is my first time trying to bottle feed fawns that should make it provided they don’t suddenly become sick.

This morning, I begun my little adventure. I apologize, I do not have any photos of the two does I’m bottle feeding, but I promise I’ll get some soon.

So around 9am this morning, I went out in the field in search of the two fawns. 108 and 109 Red (red ear tags). After just a few short minutes I found them, captured them and put them in a travel carrier for the ride back across the field. Their mom was not very happy at all and followed me most of the way back to the barn grunting at me the whole way.

The previous night I had cleaned and disinfected an indoor stall in the barn as well as all the outside stalls attached to it leading to a small grass-filled pen. I placed them in the indoor stall, gave them a dish of fresh water and put in a dish of deer feed which i don’t expect them to nibble on for probably a month at minimum. For now, they only have access to the indoor stall…just until I get them to bond with me and start taking their bottles properly.

At 2pm I attempted to feed them for the first time. I’m trying a new diet…one I read about on a deer forum. It’s called the red cap formula and it just consists of feeding the fawns as much red cap vitamin D whole milk from the grocery store  as they can consume (within reason) 3x a day for 10 weeks, 2x a day for 1 week, and 1x a day for 1 week before they’re fully weaned. So I filled two bottles with milk, warmed it up, and tried to get the fawns to eat. No dice. While I spent some time with them throughout the day petting them and trying to get them used to me, they were still scared and had no desire to suck on the bottle even after I put the nipple in their mouths. That’s okay though…it’s said they may not take to it right away. One began licking me and sucking on my hand a couple times so I figured they’d get the hang of it soon enough.

Sure enough, at 9pm, I warmed up the bottles and once again, sat them in my lap one at a time (they wouldn’t stay put if I tried to feed them standing up), and both of them took right to the bottles. Awesome!

Each one consumed approximately 3 oz of milk…hopefully that amount increases tomorrow!

They also appear to be adjusting to me…they aren’t trying to run as much except when picked up. We’ll see how the progress continues tomorrow! Once I’ve got them eating well, I’ll get some photos…and hopefully try to get some photos of them feeding as well.

For now, here’s a photo of  their half-brothers…